Breaking deaf stereotypes and normalizing sign language through gaming, Ars Technica
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sign of the times –
The deaf experience is modeled in its own language for the first time in
Deafverse .
Anthony McGlynn –
to reward students for completing homework, doing well in class, and so on.
marries that idea with a story-centered approach akin to King’s Quest and The Secret of Monkey Island. Players face common hurdles among the deaf community — like requesting an interpreter or just speaking up for themselves in a tough situation — and examine the issues involved through branching conversations and intuitive puzzles.
Deafverse
went through a range of beta tests conducted through partnered schools before the first episode, about self-advocacy, became publicly available in September . Built and rebuilt based on student feedback, the game is now effectively in its third iteration, and its increased interactive elements and animations make the universe feel immersive. “In terms of building and designing the game with different layers of gaming concepts, we got some inspiration from stories like The Matrix , “Turner explains. “You know, plugging into and experiencing things in that world, but then you have to to come out and come back into the real world. So that’s given us some ideas about how to build out into the future.”
(Enlarge) / It’s like taking the red pill, just without all the side effects like waking into a dystopian wasteland ruled by machines. Although Deafverse is primarily designed for deaf teenagers of high school age (in service of the NDC’s primary goal of supporting deaf young people’s transition into active employment), much of its subject matter is useful for anyone who wants to learn about deafness. Using federal funding through the NDC, the Deafverse development team was able to cast a wide net for research on ways deaf young people are and are not succeeding after their teen years. The results, Turner says, were cross-checked against a set list of broad learning results to create a game that teaches lessons while still being true-to-life. But Deafverse is also about connecting to those who may feel isolated. Pop culture’s rare, usually inaccurate depictions of deafness are often not of much help in that regard. “My two favorite examples are, first, people who can’t sign or they use a different version of sign language that we can’t understand, “William Albright, Senior Software Engineer on Deafverse , said of some common” deafness in pop culture “tropes. “And then, when a deaf character is chatting with other people in a movie, and the person is hearing and they speak back to the deaf person. It’s not what really happens in our life. If we can’t hear them, if a hearing person speaks to me, I sort of shut down and run away because it’s not that easy for me to engage with them as they often show in a movie or a TV show. ” As a way of addressing these issues, Deafverse is serving as a benchmark of sorts for overall accessibility within the games industry. While standards are much better than they were, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, not least in basic aspects like uniformity among subtitling and options available. Making Deafverse has involved incorporated as many variations of sign language as possible, so anyone who speaks it at any level can use it. “We didn’t want to use American Sign Language the entire time because we didn’t want people to feel like, ‘Oh, I don’t sign like so-and-so,’ or ‘I don’t sign at all, I can’t play,’ “Albright said. “We want them to feel like they have options of accessibility and we’ve really tried to keep that key. When advertising the game, if you look at the video, it does look like it’s only for kids who were born and raised in the deaf community, went to a deaf school, and only sign language their whole life. So we try to counter that by really emphasizing that it’s accessible to all hearing levels and all different types of diverse deaf people within our community. ” Breaking through with students and teachers Although games are becoming more and more common within a school setting (major releases like
Minecraft
and Assassin’s Creed having (specific) (versions) (available for teaching), there’s still a looming skepticism toward their wider usage in education. Deafverse , however, has been met with open arms by teachers relieved to have such a wide-ranging resource. Students, meanwhile, have almost uniformly reported a growth in confidence in surveys conducted after playing the game. More than that, there are also small but valuable knock-on effects for players, like understanding proper signing etiquette by following the narrator.
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